Thursday, May 3, 2012

James Oddo's Public Battle To Fix Willowbrook Park Pond Flooding $ Pays Off

The city will allocate $1 million to fix Willowbrook Park Pond, thanks to the advocacy of SI Council member James Oddo who said the mitigation work will allow the level of the pond to be controlled so it can be lowered during heavy rains.

When Hurricane Irene hit six months ago, Willowbrook Park pond overflowed, flooding nearby streets, cars and dozens of basements in homes. During a heated City Council budget hearing in March Mr. Oddo publicly aired his frustration. He tried to get Adrian Benepe to accept responsibility for the clogged drains due to what he said was a lack of basic maintenance which lead to the flooding. Benepe said it was instead an "Act Of God." (Photo: Bill Lyons/Staten island Advance)

Help is on the way for Willowbrook residents ravaged by floods during Hurricane Irene last year.

The city will allocate $1 million to fully fund a fix for Willowbrook Park Pond, which overflowed its banks and caused massive damage to the surrounding neighborhood during Hurricane Irene last year. The money will be included in Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Fiscal Year 2013 budget, which will be unveiled at City Hall tomorrow, according to the Staten Island Advance.

City Councilman James Oddo (R-Mid-Island/Brooklyn) said that he hoped the announcement would give Willowbrook residents "some mental relief immediately.

Oddo said that Benepe called him this afternoon with the news. It was the only "new needs" allocation from Parks approved by the city Office of Management and Budget, Oddo said.

"We brought a lot of passion to the fight," said Oddo. "It might be an understatement, but it wasn't a pretty process at times. Sometimes that's what it takes to break the status quo."

Oddo said that the mitigation work will allow the level of the pond to be controlled so it can be lowered during heavy rains. The rain water will run through a cement-encased culvert, which will keep it from getting blocked with debris, as happened during Irene.

A Parks spokesperson said that bids on phase 1 of the mitigation plan are due on June 1, with work possibly to begin later this year. Oddo said there was no timetable on when the work would be completed. In the interim, Parks will use a siphon which will allow the agency to drain some of the water in the pond.

The $1 million in funding, which will be added to $200,000 already in the pot, will allow the mitigation work to be done all at once. The spokesperson thanked Oddo "for advocating for funding on our behalf, and look forward to getting started on the project."

During Irene, Saybrook Street, Croft Place, Goller Place and Eton Place were flooded, with some residents evacuated in rowboats by the FDNY and hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage resulting. Some homes had eight feet of water in them. Oddo blamed insufficient infrastructure and a grate that literally became partially blocked by empty plastic soda bottles and wayward softballs from nearby fields for the flooding, saying that the pond culvert should never have been left in such poor condition.

"When something as foundational as your home is in chaos, everything else becomes bedlam," Oddo said today. The agency is in the early stages of the design for phase 2 of the project, involving the enclosed culverts.

As for the rest of the budget, a $495 million hole in the city's Fiscal Year 2013 budget will mostly be plugged with restitution money from the CityTime scandal, Bloomberg will announce.

Administration sources said that in giving his budget address at City Hall, Bloomberg will say that the budget hole comes from a $352 million decrease in tax revenue projections wrought by a slump on Wall Street, and $143 million in increased agency costs.

The numbers are updates from the mayor's preliminary budget numbers announced in February.

The hole will primarily be filled with $466 million recovered in the CityTime settlement with Science Applications International Corp. The company paid full restitution after a scandal involving a fraud-ridden city payroll system.

While the city's economy continues to grow along with tax revenues compared to the prior year, Bloomberg will say that the city's financial services firms continue to suffer, slicing profits and reducing the forecast for tax revenues from Wall Street.

On the bright side, revenue projections are up in the tech, film/TV, tourism and higher education sectors, areas that Bloomberg has looked to bolster.

"The mayor has spent the last decade diversifying the city's economy because the financial markets will always have ups and downs," said Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser. "Our efforts have paid off, with growth and job creation in non-finance sectors like tourism, tech and TV production, which softens the blow from the drastic drop in Wall Street profits."

While city agencies saved $124 million from FY 2012 and 2013, increased social service and other needs totaled $267 million, making for a net overall cost increase of $143 million.